in British law, either of two codifications of prohibitions against obscene literature adopted in 1857 and in much revised form in 1959. The earlier act, also called Lord Campbell’s Act (one of several laws named after chief justice and chancellor John Campbell, 1st Baron Campbell), not only outlawed obscene publications but empowered police to search premises on which obscene publications...

...a new kind of vigour into the tradition of English portraiture. In these first years in London, Reynolds’s knowledge of Venetian painting is very apparent in such works as the portraits of Lord Cathcart (1753/54) and Lord Ludlow (1755). Of his domestic portraits, those of Nelly O’Brien (1760–62) and of Georgiana, Countess Spencer, and her daughter (1761) are especially nota...

...by success, the Rebeccaites in 1843 turned their attention to other grievances. The government dispatched soldiers and police to South Wales, and the disorder was quelled. An act of 1844, known as Lord Cawdor’s Act, amended the turnpike trust laws in Wales and lessened the burden of the tollgate system....

a theatrical company with which Shakespeare was intimately connected for most of his professional career as a dramatist. It was the most important company of players in Elizabethan and Jacobean England....

British officer of state who is custodian of the great seal and a cabinet minister. The lord chancellor traditionally served as head of the judiciary and speaker of the House of Lords. In 2006, however, the post’s role was redefined following the implementation of several constitutional reforms. Most of the lord chancellor’s judicial functions we...

...constantly recurring in his later works. After the turn of the century, however, Hofmannsthal renounced purely lyrical forms in his essay “Ein Brief” (also called “Chandos Brief,” 1902). This essay was more than the revelation of a personal predicament; it has come to be recognized as symptomatic of the crisis that undermined the esthetic Symbolist......

the head of the judiciary of England and Wales. The lord chief justice traditionally served as head of the Queen’s (or King’s) Bench Division of the High Court of Justice and as head of the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal. Under a constitutional reform of 2005 that was effected in 2006, however, the lord chief justice assumed most of the judicial functions...

(Yoruba: “Owners of Prayer”), religious movement among the Yoruba peoples of western Nigeria, embracing some of the independent prophet-healing churches of West Africa. The movement, which in the early 1970s had several hundred thousand adherents, began about 1918 among the younger elite in the well-established Christian community. They were dissatisfied with Western religious forms ...

...by authorizing the MPPDA to create the Production Code Administration. A prominent Catholic layman, Joseph I. Breen, was appointed to head the administration, and under Breen’s auspices Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, a Catholic publisher, coauthored the code whose provisions would dictate the content of American motion pictures, without exception, for the nex...

(1774), Virginia-led attack on the Shawnee Indians of Kentucky, removing the last obstacle to colonial conquest of that area. During the early 1770s the Shawnee watched with growing distress the steady encroachment upon their rich Kentucky hunting grounds by white trappers, traders, speculators, and settlers. In early 1774 the Virginia militia seized Fort Pit...

Common-law marriages were valid in England until Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1753. The act did not apply to Scotland, however, and for many years thereafter couples went north across the border to thwart the ban. On the European continent, common-law marriages were frequent in the Middle Ages, but their legality was abolished in the Roman Catholic countries by the Council of Trent (1545–...

England’s navy was originally governed by a “great officer of state” called the lord high admiral of England. Early in the 18th century this office was placed in the hands of commissioners known as the Board of Admiralty. The board derived its powers from the royal prerogative; no act of Parliament defined or circumscribed them, except inasmuch as the discipline of the navy wa...

British officer of state who is custodian of the great seal and a cabinet minister. The lord chancellor traditionally served as head of the judiciary and speaker of the House of Lords. In 2006, however, the post’s role was redefined following the implementation of several constitutional reforms. Most of the lord chancellor’s judicial functions we...

an honorific office that came to England with the Norman ducal household. From 1153 it was held by the earls of Leicester and then of Lancaster until it came into the hands of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who assumed control over the minor King Richard II and strengthened the office. By the Duke’s order the minutes were kept of proceedings held before him on the cla...

a theatrical company in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. About 1576–79 they were known as Lord Howard’s Men, so called after their patron Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham. In 1585, when Lord Howard became England’s lord high admiral, the company changed its designation to the Admiral’s Men. It was later known succ...

island dependency of New South Wales, Australia, situated in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, about 435 miles (700 km) northeast of Sydney. Volcanic in origin, it is crescent-shaped, with two peaks (Mounts Gower and Lidgbird) each rising above 2,500 feet (760 metres) at its southern end. The island is well wooded but has little arable land. National parks cover some three-fourths...

atoll in the country of Solomon Islands, southwestern Pacific Ocean, 160 miles (257 km) north of Santa Isabel Island. A large coral formation measuring some 20 miles (32 km) by 50 miles (80 km), the atoll was visited by the Dutch navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman in 1643 and was renamed Lord Howe Islands by Capt. John Hunter of the British Navy in 1791. Passages through the encircl...

American actor who was closely identified with the television character Detective Steve McGarrett, whom he portrayed for 12 years on the series "Hawaii Five-O," and with McGarrett’s frequent closing line, "Book ’em, Danno" (b. Dec. 30, 1920, Brooklyn, N.Y.--d. Jan. 21, 1998, Honolulu, Hawaii)....

The ambitious Lord Jim (1965), with Peter O’Toole as the guilt-racked protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s novel, was considered by some to be self-indulgent, although most of the reviews were largely positive. Brooks had greater success with the action-packed The Professionals (1966), which was one of the decade’s best westerns. A p...

novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1900. The work, originally intended as a short story, grew to a full-length novel as Conrad explored in great depth the perplexing, ambiguous problem of lost honour and guilt, expiation and heroism....

English circus impresario who was, with his brother George Sanger, the proprietor of one of the largest and most important English circuses in the 19th century. (See also circus: 19th-century developments.)...

Oct. 8, 1917Baltimore, Md.May 19, 2002New York, N.Y.American writer who , reignited public interest in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic with his riveting minute-by-minute account of the ship’s final night in the best-seller A Night to Remember (1955). H...

June 9, 1941Leicester, Eng.July 16, 2012London, Eng.British musician who cofounded (1968) and played keyboard for the British rock band Deep Purple, which rose to prominence in the early 1970s with a series of hits, including “Smoke on the Water” (from Machine Head, 197...

June 9, 1941Leicester, Eng.July 16, 2012London, Eng.British musician who cofounded (1968) and played keyboard for the British rock band Deep Purple, which rose to prominence in the early 1970s with a series of hits, including “Smoke on the Water” (from Machine Head, 197...

British officer of state who is custodian of the great seal and a cabinet minister. The lord chancellor traditionally served as head of the judiciary and speaker of the House of Lords. In 2006, however, the post’s role was redefined following the implementation of several constitutional reforms. Most of the lord chancellor’s judicial functions we...

April 18, 1922Arima, Trinidad, British West IndiesFeb. 11, 2000Port of Spain, Trinidad and TobagoTrinidadian singer and songwriter who , was called the “grandmaster of calypso” and was instrumental in popularizing that music internationally; he was especially admired for his m...

...the adjudicatory phase. Most magistrates are laypeople chosen for their experience and knowledge of society and are appointed by the central government on the advice of a committee, known as the Lord Lieutenant’s Advisory Committee, for the particular county in which they are to sit. Magistrates, who are attended by a legally qualified clerk, develop significant experience in their work,...

...into the tradition of English portraiture. In these first years in London, Reynolds’s knowledge of Venetian painting is very apparent in such works as the portraits of Lord Cathcart (1753/54) and Lord Ludlow (1755). Of his domestic portraits, those of Nelly O’Brien (1760–62) and of Georgiana, Countess Spencer, and her daughter (1761) are especially notable for their tender ...

...the importance of the river crossing on the Wye and began construction of Chepstow Castle, one of many castles they eventually built in the county. The Normans ruled the area as one of the marcher lordships. These landed estates in eastern Wales and western England were independent of the English crown’s direct legal control, which gave rise to much lawlessness in the region. In 1536......

supernatural figure regarded as the protector of game in the traditions of foraging peoples. The name was devised by Western scholars who have studied such hunting and gathering societies. In some traditions, the master of the animals is believed to be the ruler of the forest and guardian of all animals; in others, he is the ruler of only one species, usually a large animal of e...

...spectacle that thrilled audiences in London and Dublin. Following a bitter creative dispute with the show’s producers, however, Flatley was fired in October 1995. His response was to develop Lord of the Dance, a spectacular Las Vegas-style Celtic dance show that featured Flatley at his most flamboyant....

The only major new musical was The Lord of the Rings at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a three-and-a-half hour, $25 million spectacular that disappointed audiences. Work had been done on the show since the tepidly received Toronto world premiere in 2006, but Matthew Warchus’s production still laboured to clarify the story and win the audience over with dancing hobbits and elves,......

For The Lord of the Rings, Jackson took the unprecedented step of shooting all three installments of the fantasy saga simultaneously, over a 15-month period in New Zealand. In addition to directing the films, he also cowrote the screenplays. The three movies—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002),.....

fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien initially published in three parts as The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1955), and The Return of the King (1955). The novel, set in the Third Age of Middle Earth, formed a sequel to Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and was succeeded by his posthumous The Silmarillion (1...

three film scores by Canadian composer Howard Shore for the films The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003), based on the three-part fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954–56) by J.R.R. Tolkien. ...

...installments of the fantasy saga simultaneously, over a 15-month period in New Zealand. In addition to directing the films, he also cowrote the screenplays. The three movies—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003)—were both critically and commercially......

...installments of the fantasy saga simultaneously, over a 15-month period in New Zealand. In addition to directing the films, he also cowrote the screenplays. The three movies—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003)—were both critically and commercially........

...period in New Zealand. In addition to directing the films, he also cowrote the screenplays. The three movies—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003)—were both critically and commercially successful. Jackson received Academy Awards for best director and......

...than poetic. One of Our Conquerors (1891) is probably the most difficult of his novels because of the indirect and cryptic style, metaphor, and long passages of interior monologue. Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), unlike its predecessor, was praised for the brilliancy and clarity of its style. The final novel, The Amazing Marriage (1895), repeats the theme of......

...College, and Helen Hunt Jackson, poet and author of the novel Ramona (1884). Dickinson resumed contact with Wadsworth, and from about age 50 she conducted a passionate romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the supreme court of Massachusetts. The letters she apparently sent Lord reveal her at her most playful, alternately teasing and confiding. In declining an......

By June 1935 producer-writer-director Phillips H. Lord had conceived a series based on the exploits of FBI agents. His new show went on the air as G-Men, but, as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover showed increasing disapproval of the series, the show was revamped as Gangbusters. Like Calling All Cars, it used real events......

in the Christian church, festival on February 2, commemorating the occasion when the Virgin Mary, in obedience to Jewish law, went to the Temple in Jerusalem both to be purified 40 days after the birth of her son and to present Jesus to God as her firstborn (Luke 2:22–38). The festival was formerly known in the Roman Catholic church as the Purification of the Blessed Virg...

Sept. 8, 1917Tobago island, British colony of Trinidad and TobagoJan. 22, 2002Port of Spain, Trinidad and TobagoTrinidadian calypso singer who , during a 72-year career, was a master of “extempo” calypso, in which the performer spontaneously devises songs filled with intricate...

Crime, and its punishment, is the theme of innumerable ballads: his sweetheart poisons “Lord Randal”; “Little Musgrave” is killed by Lord Barnard when he is discovered in bed with Lady Barnard, and the lady, too, is gorily dispatched. The murders of “Jim Fisk,” Johnny of “Frankie and Johnny,” and many other ballad victims are prompted by sexu...

...Balfour, the Conservative leader, said of him that he carried “heavy but not very mobile guns.” In matter as in style he modeled himself on his father, as his admirable biography, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906; revised edition 1952), makes evident, and from the first he wore his Toryism with a difference, advocating a fair, negotiated peace for the Boers and deploring......

The term soca (initially spelled sokah) was coined in the 1970s by Trinidadian musician Lord Shorty (Garfield Blackman), who sang calypso, a type of Afro-Trinidadian song style characterized by storytelling and verbal wit. According to Lord Shorty, the new music was meant to be a fusion of calypso with East Indian music, a reflection of Trinidad’s two dominant ethnic groups......

...Titanic. They also stated that it had been moving and that efforts to contact it by Morse lamp had been unsuccessful. After sighting rockets in the distance, the crew informed Capt. Stanley Lord, who had retired for the night. Instead of ordering the ship’s wireless operator to turn on the radio, Lord told the men to continue to use the Morse lamp. By 2:00 am...

in England, an official of the royal household, whose duties were originally domestic and who was known as the “chief steward” of the household. The office was of considerable political importance under the Tudors and Stuarts, and it carried cabinet rank during the 18th century. In 1924 it ceased to be a political appointment and since then it has been filled at the discretion of the...

in England, an official of the royal household, whose duties were originally domestic and who was known as the “chief steward” of the household. The office was of considerable political importance under the Tudors and Stuarts, and it carried cabinet rank during the 18th century. In 1924 it ceased to be a political appointment and since then it has been filled at the discretion of the...

After the 12th century the lord steward also presided over the Lord Steward’s Court, which had jurisdiction over offenses and felonies committed by the king’s servants, and over the Marshalsea Court; this was a court of record held before the lord steward and the knight marshal of the household, and it had civil and criminal jurisdiction over any action within the verge where at leas...

prominent Elizabethan acting company. A household troupe of Lord Strange, they toured the provinces before appearing at court in 1582. From 1588 to 1594 they were associated with the Admiral’s Men. It has been suggested that Lord Strange’s Men were the first to employ William Shakespeare, though his role in the company is unclear. The troupe perf...

Oct. 8, 1917Baltimore, Md.May 19, 2002New York, N.Y.American writer who , reignited public interest in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic with his riveting minute-by-minute account of the ship’s final night in the best-seller A Night to Remember (1955). H...

collection of poems by Robert Lowell, published in 1946. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Some of the poems reflect Lowell’s New England roots; others have Roman Catholic themes; and still others recall events that occurred during World War II....

...the city’s university moved to Helsinki, the grand duchy’s new administrative centre. Much of the intellectual activity in the new university town was centred on the Lördagssällskapet (Saturday Society), a group of young men that counted among its members, in addition to Runeberg, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Zacharias Topelius, and, as an occasional guest, Elias L...

Lordosis, or swayback, is an increased curvature in the lumbar (middle-to-lower) region of the vertebral column, and it may be associated with spondylolisthesis, inflammation of the intervertebral disk, or obesity. Kyphosis, commonly called roundback, humpback, or hunchback, is an increased curvature of the thoracic (upper) vertebral column; it may be caused by congenital malformation of the......

...courts. News of the judges’ opinions frightened the king’s critics, who reacted by bringing an accusatio, or formal appeal, against his allies of treason. The Lords Appellant, as they were now called—the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Warwick, Arundel, Nottingham, and Derby—mobilized their retinues in self-defense. Richard d...

English governmental advisory body established by William III in May 1696 to replace the Lords of Trade (1675) in the supervision of colonial affairs. The board was to examine colonial legislation and to recommend disallowance of those laws that conflicted with imperial trade policies, to nominate governors and other high officials for royal colonies and to write the instructions for appointed gov...

headquarters and home ground of the Marylebone Cricket Club, long the world’s foremost cricket organization, and the scene of Test Matches between England and visiting national teams and of matches of the Middlesex County Cricket Club, Oxford versus Cambridge, and Eton versus Harrow. Various cup finals and one-day international matches also take place there. The original ...

first day of the week; in Christianity, the Lord’s Day, the weekly memorial of Jesus Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. The practice of Christians gathering together for worship on Sunday dates back to apostolic times, but details of the actual development of the custom are not clear. Before the end of the 1st century ad, the author of Revelation gave the first day i...

the upper chamber of Great Britain’s bicameral legislature. Originated in the 11th century, when the Anglo-Saxon kings consulted witans (councils) composed of religious leaders and the monarch’s ministers, it emerged as a distinct element of Parliament in the 13th and 14th centuries. It currently comprises the following element...

...Monster’s Ball (2001) he portrayed a young corrections officer who questions old family prejudices. In 2005 Ledger appeared as pioneering skateboarder Skip Engblom in Lords of Dogtown and as the legendary title character in the comedy Casanova. Ledger drew further praise as a heroin addict in Candy (2...

(Latin: “Our Father”), prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples, and the principal prayer used by all Christians in common worship. It appears in two forms in the New Testament, the shorter version in Luke 11:2–4 and the longer version, part of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6:9–13. In both contexts it is offered as a model of h...

Increased attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) prompted elements of four African armies, aided by 100 U.S. Special Forces, to engage in the jungle hunt for the LRA’s elusive leader, Joseph Kony. On May 13 a Ugandan army spokesman announced the capture in CAR of Caesar Achellam, a leading commander in the LRA....

in Christianity, ritual commemoration of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, at which (according to tradition) he gave them bread with the words, “This is my body,” and wine with the words, “This is my blood.” The story of the institution of the Eucharist by Jesus on the night before his Crucifixion is r...

the oldest surviving Christian church order, probably written in Egypt or Syria in the 2nd century. In 16 short chapters it deals with morals and ethics, church practice, and the eschatological hope (of the Second Coming of Christ at the end of time) and presents a general program for instruction and initiation into the primitive church....

(Arum maculatum), a tuberous herb of the arum family, order Arales, native to southern Europe and northern Africa. Like many other aroids, cuckoopint contains a bitter, sometimes poisonous sap; the red berries are particularly toxic. In England, where it is common in woods and hedgerows, it is also known as wake-robin....

...the importance of the river crossing on the Wye and began construction of Chepstow Castle, one of many castles they eventually built in the county. The Normans ruled the area as one of the marcher lordships. These landed estates in eastern Wales and western England were independent of the English crown’s direct legal control, which gave rise to much lawlessness in the region. In 1536......

...in the reign of Sigismund I (1506–48), whose wife came from the Sforza family of Lombardy. The rebuilding of his Wawel Castle (1507–36) in Kraków was begun by the Italian Francesco della Lore and continued by Bartolommeo Berecci of Florence. It presents a blend of local Gothic and 15th-century Italian architecture. The great courtyard has three stories of loggias; the......

...pit vipers, for example, while not always long, are often big. It seems likely that these snakes evolved in the direction of heaviness only after the development of a heat-sensitive depression, the loreal pit, located between the eye and the nostril, and the venom apparatus, which enabled them to stay in one place and wait for their prey, rather than engaging in a continuous active search for.....

Venetian nobleman and admiral who became one of the city’s popular heroes. His naval achievements ensured Venice’s supremacy over its trading rivals in the Mediterranean and made it the dominant power in northeast Italy in the 15th century....

large rock on the bank at a narrows of the Rhine River near Sankt Goarshausen, Ger. The rock produces an echo and is associated with the legend of a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. The essentials of the legend were claimed as his invention by German writer Clemens Brentano in......

large rock on the bank at a narrows of the Rhine River near Sankt Goarshausen, Ger. The rock produces an echo and is associated with the legend of a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. The essentials of the legend were claimed as his invention b...

large rock on the bank at a narrows of the Rhine River near Sankt Goarshausen, Ger. The rock produces an echo and is associated with the legend of a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. The essentials of the legend were claimed as his invention by German writer Clemens Brentano in......

large rock on the bank at a narrows of the Rhine River near Sankt Goarshausen, Ger. The rock produces an echo and is associated with the legend of a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine in despair over a faithless lover and was transformed into a siren who lured fishermen to destruction. The essentials of the legend were claimed as his invention b...

town, northeastern Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, southwestern Pacific Ocean. It lies on Seeadler Harbour. Captured by the Japanese in 1942, the settlement was retaken by Allied forces in 1944 and eventually became part of a large U.S. naval and air base. As a port, the town handles the local copra production. Pop. (2000)......

...1156–1217). Other German medieval versions of the story include Konrad von Würzburg’s Schwanritter (“Swan Knight”) and an anonymous 15th-century epic called Lorengel. The latter was the chief source used by the 19th-century composer and librettist Richard Wagner for his opera Lohengrin (first performed on Aug. 28, 1850, at Weimar, Ger.)....

the force exerted on a charged particle q moving with velocity v through an electric E and magnetic field B. The entire electromagnetic force F on the charged particle is called the Lorentz force (after the Dutch physicist Hendrik A. Lorentz) and is given by ...

Dutch physicist and joint winner (with Pieter Zeeman) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1902 for his theory of electromagnetic radiation, which, confirmed by findings of Zeeman, gave rise to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity....

set of equations in relativity physics that relate the space and time coordinates of two systems moving at a constant velocity relative to each other. Required to describe high-speed phenomena approaching the speed of light, Lorentz transformations formally express the relativity concepts that space and time are not absolute; that length, time, and mass depend on the relative motion of the observ...

in relativity physics, the shortening of an object along the direction of its motion relative to an observer. Dimensions in other directions are not contracted. The concept of the contraction was proposed by the Irish physicist George FitzGerald in 1889, and it was thereafter independently developed by Hendrik Lorentz of the Netherlands. The Michelson...

Music lovers in more than a dozen states along the Eastern Seaboard in the 1950s tuned in to “the Sound of the Hound,” George (“Hound Dog”) Lorenz, who broadcast on 50,000-watt WKBW in Buffalo, New York. Lorenz began in Buffalo radio in the late 1940s; in 1953 he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where the Hound Dog went up against the King of the Moon Doggers, Alan Freed. Free...

Austrian zoologist, founder of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour by means of comparative zoological methods. His ideas contributed to an understanding of how behavioral patterns may be traced to an evolutionary past, and he was also known for his work on the roots of aggression. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with the animal behaviouris...

...in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a......